Microsoft is continuing its efforts to simplify its product lines, and has cut the number of versions for the next release of Windows Server down from twelve to just four: Datacenter, Standard, Essentials, and Foundation. Pretty straightforward. Windows Home Server gets axed, but then again, I don't think anybody bought Windows Home Servers anyway.

If there's anything else you mean by this, then please explain - but Mono does not solve the issue, and .Net runs only on Windows, so they are indeed going from a multi-platform language (Java) to a single platform language suite (.Net).

TBH, I was putting it in there because I was being trite after the "Java Doesn't Run Anywhere" comment, when before you said "Should be portable between nix systems".

Those legacy applications are most likely POSIX complaint, which Linux does support. The Tier 1 vendors do provide wrappers functionality so that an AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/etc application can run on Linux as the return values and behaviours can be slightly different where POSIX is ambiguous. That is well known, not conjecture.

"Most Likely" ... so it is still a guess.

Considering some of the cluster-fuck coding I have seen in C#.NET by contractors (who seem to think it is Java) and considering C# and Visual Studio should make things bloody easy to write nice code ... well you see where this is going.

The wrapper functionality makes the porting to Linux very easy, and cuts costs substantially - in many cases it just runs as the intent is to use them on binaries that can't be ported.

I know how stuff works thanks, I might be a lowly web dev, but I did OS 101 stuff as well.

True, Linux isn't magically the answer. True too IBM's fees are high. But we don't know if he's dealing with IBM, HP, or another vendor. For all we know he could be dealing with Microsoft's Xenix as the original Unix system - in which case MS won't offer any help moving to Linux, or if they do they'll make it significantly cheaper to go to Windows. (Yes, Microsoft owns their own official Unix variant.)

So there's not enough information to say more than I did.

If the application is really old, chances are that you could probably do a rewrite using C# for much cheaper as long as you get the requirements right.

You obviously misunderstood what I said.

BSD is a Unix Variant. For him to say that BSD was not an option is like saying that Unix is not an option. FreeBSD may be open source, but AIX/HP-UX/etc all had incorporated some of the BSDi Unix from which FreeBSD/OpenBSD/etc were derived. So in all likelihood they were running BSD variant of some sorts already.

Why do you guys seem to be insistent on schooling me about where various *nix came from? I bloody well know where it came from.

No. He explicitly stated it was a top-down decision made by the upper echelons of management. That is exactly who Microsoft markets to, and who they purposely mislead.

So the CEO/COO/etc who made the decision likely made it based on Microsoft's marketing materials instead of consulting their employees to get a real answer which often would be very different.

For instance, many large organizations are already running Linux even if the upper management doesn't know it. It is very possible that they were already able to run their legacy applications on Linux without any costs for porting, but they didn't consult their own employees and thus didn't find out that that may have been the case - in which case, they already have all the in-house knowledge to move off the Unix systems to a Linux-based system, no need for retraining costs, etc.